These days, companies in Plymouth count on reliable Internet access as the lifeblood of their business. All companies, from Fortune 500 to small companies, have functions that rely on easy, dependable and quick access to The Internet.
Our dependence on Internet access will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
From email messaging to information sharing, e-commerce to archiving data, and voice over IP to video conferencing, the net is omnipresent. What is the best solution for you? Maybe a cable modem is a sufficient solution. It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Would Gigabit Internet suffice? Will your Plymouth organization needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg access to The Internet or 100 Meg Internet access point?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your business, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Will web surfing and email be your primary use of the web? Is connecting with cloud servers and sharing real time data the main use of the internet? Do remote places depend on you hosting the data in Plymouth?
What if your high-speed Internet is disrupted by an outage? What will happen to your company? How will the downtime affect your organization? Is your success reliant on uptime? Prior to making any purchases, you must determine the answers to these questions.
Plainly stated, companies require high-speed Internet access. You need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits to your company before choosing the right broadband internet. While various providers will throw around terminology like:
… focus on what matters: what does your business need and what are the best services and solutions out there to meet those needs?
At most businesses including those in Plymouth, some or all employees need Internet access. There are countless reasons to need access to the net. Perhaps it is to order materials, to conduct organization research or speak with clients.
The number of employees you have may determine your best solution. A five or ten megabyte Internet circuit may be all you need if employ a small workforce. If you have many employees who need to use the internet at the same time, you may do better with more.
Perhaps most workers at your company use an intranet system with limited features. High- speed Internet may not be a priority in this case. If your organization functions demand the downloading of documents and images or videos on a regular basis, speed becomes a must more important issue.
Do you backup information? If you are doing remote backups from every desk, which is advisable, you will need to be able to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize your backup data.
Are you using a service such as DropBox or Google drive to share files? After a file is saved, it goes to the cloud and then to someone else’s computer. You must have sufficient bandwidth if you are to successfully support every service including file sharing.
Depending on your location, high-speed organization access to The web, including Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options. They are almost always found in “lit buildings” in Plymouth that are already wired by a carrier. The ease and affordability of adding high-speed Internet to your office may surprise you.
Absent the need to introduce Metro Ethernet into a new building, it is not particularly costly to connect Metro Ethernet to a suite or office within that building. You can actually get high-speed access with gigabit Internet or even Metro Ethernet quickly. It often takes only 30 days or less, depending on availability.
Ask yourself this: Does we host our own servers to run APIs, websites and data feeds to external offices or business premises? Is your main business office with a hosted application accessed by 40 or even 50 branch office sites? Are you a retail company with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different locations?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. Those people are not able to work without a solid Internet connection. Make sure that when you choose your intranet solution it is reliable enough to support your need for multiple and simultaneous connections for many different places.
For a single office surfing the web, a cable modem or inexpensive 10 Meg circuit may be adequate. High-speed dedicated circuits, Metro Ethernet or gigabit Ethernet are advisable for company headquarters. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would not be able to accomplish this.
In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. There may be a lower monthly rate, but bandwidth is usually shared with many tenants. If you subscribe to a cable modem with a 30-megabyte connection, you would expect to always be able to reach that high speed. However, it is possible that during peak hours, you won’t. Cable operators are only permitted to establish a certain amount of bandwidth within communities. Whatever that amount of bandwidth is, it branches into all buildings in the community and to all tenants in those buildings. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?
Guaranteed bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth are solutions that some providers offer. In this scenario, the bandwidth is fully allocated to you and your company or organization. No one else uses it. Notwithstanding the existence of tenants, offices or buildings in the area, you should have the full capability of your circuits at all times.
Metro Ethernet provides guaranteed bandwidth in increments as follows: 5, 10, 50 and 100 Meg circuits. Gigabit Internet providers offer gigabit speeds from your office to the web.
The providers in this situation deliver high-speed to a particular building in sufficient quantity to split their circuit among various tenants. Of course, they must ensure that they each get the specific amount of their contracted speed.
Despite outstanding Internet bandwidth products offered by providers in Plymouth, Minnesota, circuits do go down. You must ask yourself: “how do I lessen the chance of an outage? ”
The answer is redundant circuits.
Redundancy in this situation comes in two forms.
With the first kind, you receive several circuits but they all come from the same carrier. In this situation, the redundancy helps protect you from port issues or physical line issues. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. While offering some protection, it is not without risk.
The second way to set up circuit redundancy is by using two different providers to bring in your circuits. These connections can be bound together so they act and appear to the public as a single circuit. Using particular routers and IP address allocations, no one would be able to tell that you have multiple carriers or circuits. In reality, they are completely separate and redundant to each other. You will get more substantial protection from this diversity redundancy. Should one carrier have some trouble that extends to a greater area and is out of your control, you are backed up with a different carrier.
For maximum redundancy, you should look for redundant circuits from different providers with different physical geographic pathways in Plymouth, Minnesota. Basically this means that you want your circuits to enter your building on different sides or paths. The circuits would attached to the proper outside source whether a subterranean conduit or a telephone pole. They would be set up in different directions and would lead to different data centers or main office spaces. What if there is some kind of catastrophic incident such as a fire or accident that impacts circuits within a region? Now, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.
Internet access costs money but the cost of NOT having reliable access to The Internet is greater. Think about the following situations:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. During your working day, those tenants could be conducting massive downloads of information, processing a large amount of calls or streaming endless video. How will your telephone calls be affected as the amount of available bandwidth decreases? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Are the calls going to be dropped? Will they be full of static?
Regardless of whether you are part of a legal practice and your firm does file sharing, or an accounting practice sharing databases, your office is the central point or hub of your organization. Whether you have 2 locations, 250, or 2000, they all rely on your primary Internet connection to retrieve data and information. Your circuit goes down, now what happens? Is it a mere annoyance or a catastrophic failure? Can your satellite or remote office do any work at all? Can they take or process any orders at all? Dispense and receive data? Make sure you completely understand your needs before you pick a solution. Maybe you are a corporation that designs and sells software and you run a hosted solution that is used by hundreds and hundreds of customers. Perhaps you operate a service where other systems speak with yours via an API to calculate freight prices, commodity prices, collect current weather data or receive any other information that you serve up. What if other systems can’t connect to your office servers? Will your customers remain loyal to you if they have to withstand multiple outages?
Does your company completely rely on the net? Should your circuits go down, your representatives cannot make outbound calls. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. You are now, essentially, out of business. Is redundancy enough? Are your current carriers as dependable as you would like? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?
Clearly, there are many choices. Your decision will be based on different factors including your organization needs and your budget. To recap:
If you have one location or office and do not feel the need to consider redundancy for your system, a smaller Internet access circuit may be all you need. A single fifty, ten or five megabyte circuit might be enough. Gigabit service and Metro Ethernet options seem expensive. If you are in a lit building, however, they can be less than you think. Look into it. Speak with our engineers about what is right for you. Prices vary with location and circuit availability.
Mid sized companies with a single office in Plymouth, Minnesota, need higher speed access to The net. You have several choices. Consider the following: Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet or higher-speed access to The Internet circuits. Ideally, you want to have the greatest redundancy. You can achieve this by using multiple circuits from different providers. You can sometimes achieve this without doubling costs. Using one 100-megabyte circuit instead of two 50-megabyte circuits, is one example. Do not forget that you will find variations in price and availability. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of organization or offices. Redundancy is crucial. Multiple carriers would be great. Also, redundant equipment such as switches and routers in your facility can minimize the risk of downtime. Look at all of your options: Ethernet access services, gigabit Internet providers, Metro Ethernet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your company run as efficiently as possible.
If you fall into this group, you must have Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet circuits and point-to-point High-speed Internet circuits. In order to maximize and protect your uptime, you must have redundancy. You should have redundant circuits from multiple carriers in addition to redundant hardware. You must have the bandwidth to withstand sharp increases in usage. Doing so will help protect you from slowdowns or interruptions. Your goal is to have hardware and circuits that are more than capable of providing support to a significant number of fast and simultaneous connections.
There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. It is imperative that the circuit or circuits you choose meet your needs but also keep you within your allowable budget. Selecting the appropriate mix of circuits and hardware can overwhelm you.
Our engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. Our experts will examine your current usage and demand. We are going to then generate a design that gives you the resources you need while keeping your organization up and running at a reasonable cost.
You can complete the contact form on the right side of this page by clicking here. If you would prefer, please call our office to set up an appointment for an assessment. It can take as little as 48 hours to provide a complete assessment.